There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will.

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

The first problem with all of the stuff that's out there on leadership is that we haven't got a clue what we're talking about. We typically think of the leader as being the person at the top. But if you define a leader as an executive, then you absolutely deny everyone else in an organization the opportunity to be a leader.

The leader is best,When people are hardly aware of his existence,Not so good when people praise his government,Less good when people stand in fear,Worst, when people are contemptuous.Fail to honor people, and they will fail to honor you.But of a good leader, who speaks little,When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,The people say, 'We did it ourselves.'

People don't believe what you tell them They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves. What leaders do: they give people stories they can tell themselves. Stories about the future and about change.

Hope without a strategy doesn’t generate leadership. Leadership comes when your hope and your optimism are matched with a concrete vision of the future and a way to get there. People won’t follow you if they don’t believe you can get to where you say you’re going.

The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.